Auditing Redundancy in Election Records

Elections are conceptually trivial: After everyone has voted, the votes in each ballot position are counted, and the winner of each race is declared. Barring the use of some form of rankedpreference ballot, the algorithms required are hardly more than mere summations. What makes elections difficult is the problem of performing this summation over a canvassing hierarchy spanning many polling places and local election offices, where every single participant has a vested interest in the outcome. Complete trust cannot be extended to any single authority to run an honest election because every candidate for such trust may have a vested interest and may end up abusing that trust. Therefore, voting systems must be secured not only against improper actions by voters and election officials, but also against improper actions by programmers, technicians, and system administrators.